Athlon/DDR mobos (was Re: What do you guys thing about the P4)

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> Speaking of DDR Athlons -- are there any motherboards that are actually
> available out there? Most of what I was able to find in a modest
> websearch was VIA KT7 with ordinary SDRAM; the one or two vendors (e.g
> ASUS) with a DDR/Athlon motherboard listed said something about being
> currently unavailable. Any recommendations or caveats? I have grant
> money that must be spent, and if I cannot find DDR's right now I'll have
> to do ordinary SDRAM.
There are a couple uniproc Athlon/DDR motherboards that are available
right now if you look hard. The most widely available ones are the
Gigabyte GA-7DX and the Biostar M7MIA. I have one of the Biostar mobos in
a 1.2GHz Athlon system at home.
The major problem with DDR memory right now is finding DIMMs that are
stable at the 133MHz system bus speed. Some batches of Nanya PC2100-rated
DDR RAM are very unstable (i.e. cause silent lockups) unless you downclock
them to 100MHz (PC1600), and I just sent back a stick of Samsung
PC2100-rated DDR RAM that had the same problem. Unfortunately none of the
current crop of Athlon/DDR mobos have handle running the memory bus at
100MHz and the front side bus at 133MHz, so I was stuck running my 1.2GHz
Athlon at 900MHz to keep it up for more than about five minutes...
--Troy
--
Troy Baer email: troy at osc.edu
Science & Technology Support phone: 614-292-9701
Ohio Supercomputer Center web: http://oscinfo.osc.edu